CGRG Bibliography of Canadian Geomorphology
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Author : Cruden, D.M.
Date : 1997
Title : Rapid mass movement and climate: a North American perspective.
Publication : Rapid Mass Movement as a Source of Climatic Evidence for the Holocene. Edited by: B. Frenzel. Palaoklimaforschung
Issue : 19:
Page(s) : 371-378.
Abstract
Canada and its borderlands were glaciated during the Pleistocene. So, Holocene erosion and sedimentation is taking place under paraglacial conditions. The upland curve of Church and Slaymaker (1989) may have similarities to large rock-slide activity in Kananaskis Country, in the Front Ranges of the Canadian Rockies in Alberta. The temporal distribution of these landslides has been estimated by both steady state and exhaustion models. However, as rock sliding down bedding surfaces on overdip slope exhausts hazardous sites to leave stable dip-slope landforms, the distribution of rockslides can be better explained by an exhaustion model than by a steady state model. One exhaustion model assumes exponential decay of the number of landslide sites and approximates upland activity in paraglacial time. The half-life of a site in thick-bedded carbonates is 5700 years. Such lithologies may be the best sedimentary rocks for studies of catastrophic slope decay.
Bibliography of Canadian Geomorphology